Who among the following was arrested in the Bhusawal Bomb Case ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), Sadashiv Malkapurkar. He belonged to the circle of revolutionaries that gathered around Chandrashekhar Azad in the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, and specifically to the Jhansi group, a set of young men of Maharashtrian descent settled in the Bundelkhand region who became Azad's closest shelter and support in the years after the Kakori case. Malkapurkar was arrested in 1929 and prosecuted in the case that is remembered by the name of the town where it centred — Bhusawal, the great railway junction of Jalgaon district in Khandesh — and he served a long term of imprisonment for it. He is remembered in Maharashtra for one further reason: of all the men in the movement, he was among the very few Azad ever brought into his own family's confidence, and after his release he looked after Azad's mother. That personal detail is why his name survives in Marathi accounts of the revolutionary movement even though the Bhusawal case itself is far less documented than Kakori, Lahore or Meerut. This is a single-fact recall question with no internal structure to reason from — there are no statements to test, no combination to narrow, and the three other names are not absurd. That has a direct consequence in the hall. With a quarter of the marks deducted for a wrong answer, a question of this shape is worth attempting only if you can positively identify the right name, not if you can merely make the others feel less likely. Guessing between four Maharashtrian names of the revolutionary period, all of which sound plausible in the same decade, has a negative expected value; recognising Malkapurkar as one of Azad's Jhansi companions is what earns the two marks.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The strongest distractor by far, and the one that separates a candidate who has read about the Azad circle from one who has memorised a single name. Vishwanath Vaishampayan was a real and important member of the same Jhansi group — he was among Azad's closest associates and later wrote about him at length — so the name carries exactly the right associations for this question. But the Bhusawal case is attached in the record to Malkapurkar, not to him. This card deliberately does not assign Vaishampayan to a different case in order to make the contrast tidier: the trap here is precisely that a plausible association feels like a remembered one, and inventing a substitute fact would repeat the error rather than correct it.  (c) A name of the right region and the right period, placed here because it sounds like it belongs. This card does not attach any case or organisation to it, because no attribution could be verified, and an explanation that invented one would be worse than an explanation that admits the gap. What is worth taking away is the technique. When three of four names in a recall question are people you cannot place, the question is not asking you to eliminate them; it is asking whether you can positively identify the fourth. If you cannot, the item is a guess, and on a paper that deducts a quarter of the marks for a wrong answer a four-way guess loses money over a full paper.  (d) As with option (3), this is a plausible-sounding Maharashtrian name of the revolutionary decades, and this card will not manufacture a biography for it. The general point is about how single-fact questions are built. A setter needs three names that a candidate cannot confidently rule out, and the easiest way to get them is to draw from the same regional and chronological pool as the answer — same language community, same decades, same kind of activity. That is why elimination almost never works on this question type, and why the preparation that pays is a short list of named cases with the names attached to each, rather than a long list of names with no cases attached.

Concept: The revolutionary movement of the 1920s and 1930s is examined through its conspiracy cases, because the cases are what generated records, names and dates. The main sequence runs from the Kakori case of 1925, arising out of the train robbery near Lucknow, through the reorganisation of the Hindustan Republican Association into the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in 1928, the killing of Saunders at Lahore and the bomb thrown in the Central Legislative Assembly in April 1929, to the Lahore Conspiracy Case that ended in the executions of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru in March 1931. Chandrashekhar Azad, who was never captured, held the network together through those years and died in a gunfight at Alfred Park in Allahabad in February 1931. Around that main line sit a number of smaller regional cases which produced arrests and long sentences without producing famous martyrdoms, and the Bhusawal bomb case belongs to that second category. Its Maharashtra connection is twofold: the town is a railway junction in Jalgaon district, and several of Azad's closest companions in the Jhansi group came from Maharashtrian families settled in Bundelkhand.

State PCS 2026 Q9 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q9 — History PYQ with Answer